of Granby. The house is gone but. His son Swift was my best friend in college and they were my second family. Three of us fished the Fraser often. Can see the log corrals, the ring where Becky trained her horses and riding students. Could probably find a stack of my old books in the log outbuilding where I used to sleep. Today I don’t want the memories. I fly over.
Right through the gunsight slot of Gore Canyon wingtips up against rock both sides. Seems like. Fished here, too, the river dropping so fast, the rapids so loud, reverberating off the cliff—you had to be careful as you walked down the railroad tracks to look back often. More than one fisherman never heard or saw the train coming. Air over the water cold and heavy throwing up mist, the Beast loving it.
Do I? I used to love to fly like this. Twisting through a canyon fifty feet off the water.
Now I don’t feel anything. I feel the way my unwadered legs felt after ten minutes in the snowmelt. Numb and glad to be. Glad to be numb.
The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb the dead never do, if they never want anything.
Sunlight. Out the other end. The river quieting to black water, the rock folding back to hills, woods unburned. I can see duck smattering the pools. Herons out of the reeds, angular, spreading those huge wings at the sound of the plane. Color of smoke.
What do you want? Hig. What?
I want to be the color of smoke.
Then what?
Then. Then.
Pull back hard on the yoke and climb steeply out of the hole at State Bridge. Dry sheep hills, herds of antelope and deer scattered. In the flats along the Colorado River I can see the once swank Eagle Airport. Key the mike and call the tower. Ask for clearance to pass through their airspace. A hope and a habit.
Where am I en route to? Junction maybe. With a jog south to the Uncompahgre Plateau, the places I used to hunt. For no reason.
I want to say
II
Sudden lurch and buck. Again. Thrown to the left, left wing dipping. Hold tight to the yoke, correct and watch the altimeter. I love this. The yoke in my hands is neutral, the plane level and the altimeter needle is circling clockwise upwards. Updraft. The trees get smaller, pressure in the seat cushion like a great lifting hand. Late morning thermal, the still dark woods soaking the sun and throwing up this plume of warm air. The unasked lift is fast, heady, a little alarming.
Gain fifteen hundred feet with no work at all. Cross high over the Roaring Fork right over Carbondale, unburned, surrounded by rivers and green ranches. I blink. Looks like cattle there. Cattle of old. Black and red. Must be—nothing else that color. Damn. Cattle gone wild, sticking to home, miraculously out of the mouths of wolves. I’d drop to look but don’t want to lose this height nor spend the gas to climb again for the next pass.
A ranch. Cattle. The spring river flowing by. A ranch house in the shade of leafing cottonwoods and globe willows. A cracked and broken road winding by. Squint and I can imagine someone in the yard. Someone leaning to bolt a spreader to the tractor. Someone thinking
More normal the absences.
Huntsman’s Ridge. Can see the long rockslide we used to ski, called it Endless. Seemed so then. Be perfect now: spring corn-snow compacted and stable. Zero avalanche danger.
Half the aspen forest still in leaf, still living. On our left the rugged wall of the Raggeds. I nod, fly over.
Now the country gets soft. It will be aspen forests for miles. I tap the fuel gauge.
Twenty nine point three gallons. Not enough gas to get home. As simple as that.
As simple as that we go over the edge.
I was wondering: Is this what it’s like to die? To be this alone? To hold to a store of love and pass over?
We almost moved here. Paonia. Some misspelling of Peony. Melissa was tired of teaching, tired of the principal and the District, was itching to try something else. Organic farming maybe. Building was a lot slower over on this side of the state but I could’ve probably pieced it together with remodels, cabinets, the odd house. First time I saw it I thought it looked like a train set. Looks like a train set still. I let the Beast fall.
Cut power and glide down the south slope of Grand Mesa, the tops of the soft aspens a few feet under our belly. Still green, the pale trunks still startling, the ferns beneath them still a thick carpet no doubt harboring deer. Whoosh off a band of cliff. And the valley opens: a green river bottom backed by a high double mountain with a swooping saddle between. Orchards, the neat rows of tufted trees on either side of the river. Vineyards too. Tall cottonwoods marking the westward twisting course of the stream. In the west, where the river flows out of the valley into a dry desert scrubland, I can see the railroad tracks, the flat topped mesas and the massing uplift of the Plateau, purple in the morning haze. And the town, more a hamlet, clustered between the river and the hill with the white stone P.
Bought groceries here often, ammo, dog food. Used to wait seven minutes at the crossing while the coal train clattered by. Timed it once, resenting the loss of daylight. Look over at Jasper’s seat.
You loved it here, huh, bud. Walk down to the river below the town park and throw the stick in the current. You weren’t too good at stick. Or swimming. Loved it anyway. We should all be like that huh?
Bank downriver and aim for the high dry plateau. Guts in a knot.
I cannot live like this. Cannot live at all not really. What was I doing? Nine years of pretending.
The road we took crossed a green bridge. The canyon was called Dominguez. I am eight hundred feet above the ground. See the bridge. See the orchard pressed against the canyon walls, the dirt track. Follow it.
Sparse forest, pinons, junipers almost black and still living. Desert trees that don’t grow up but grow gnarled and thick. Stunted and stubborn. Remind me of Bangley. They just refuse to die at any price. Some of these have been here since the so-named Spanish priest traveled through here with his god.
Never flown this. We always came here in a truck. The road is grown in. Overgrown track swings away from the smaller river to climb a ridge. Bank right to follow it into another drainage and the country I used to hunt. But. Off to the left in the path of the creek a flash of red rock, the upper wall of a canyon just revealed. Always amazed that such a small stream can leave such a landmark, that so much big country stays hidden in these clefts. I bank back to take a look.
As I near, the rim reveals the ruddy face of a high wall, deep red and waterstained in strips of black and ochre. Cut by ledges. Pale printed outline where a huge block came unglued. The cliff two hundred feet high if a foot.
It’s a box canyon. I’ll be damned. The exploding lime green tops of cottonwoods, a few bristled ponderosas. And. I circle tight. How could I have never seen it? Because I was following the road, if you call it that.
The split and riven little canyon widens into this boisterous green hole. Creek winds through. A meadow on the left bank. And. So shocked and curious I am descending in my gyre and I almost spiral into the high wall.
A stone hut against the cliff. Smoke wafting from. A stone bridge over the creek to the field. Cattle scattered on the watered grass. Half a dozen.
Cattle.
And.
